Pelosi bucks Senate proposal on Trump emergency declaration

Saagar Enjeti of the Daily Caller reports U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s response to a Senate-led effort to address President Trump’s emergency declaration for the southern border.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi ruled out an ongoing Senate Republican-led effort to avoid a showdown with President Donald Trump over his declaration of a national emergency.

“Republican Senators are proposing new legislation to allow the President to violate the Constitution just this once in order to give themselves cover. The House will not take up this legislation to give President Trump a pass,” Pelosi said in a Wednesday statement.

Republican senators and the White House hatched a plan Tuesday to try and push an alternative bill to the disapproval resolution currently before the upper chamber of Congress. The alternative bill would allow wavering Republicans to vote for a resolution that would bind a president’s future powers to declare a national emergency.

The Republicans who have publicly said they will vote for the resolution include Sens. Rand Paul, Susan Collins, Thom Thillis and Lisa Murkowski. All of the senator’s voiced concern that Trump was circumventing Congress’s enumerated power of the purse to appropriate funds and use them as he pleases. All expressed concern that future Democratic presidents would exploit Trump’s action and declare their own national emergencies to fulfill campaign promises. …

… If the disapproval resolution passed the Senate it would require a veto from Trump, the first of his presidency. White House officials told The Daily Caller they want to avoid an embarrassing rebuke from a chamber of Congress that Republicans control, especially on Trump’s signature campaign issue.